Nashville’s animal shelter is over capacity and not accepting owner surrenders

Nashville’s city-run animal shelter is hitting pause on owner surrenders because space is so limited.

Under normal circumstances, Metro Animal Care and Control allows walk-in owner surrenders for unwanted pets. Workers assess the behavior of the pet and medical conditions to determine whether to admit them to the shelter.

Because demand was so high for space, the shelter had cut back to offering surrenders by appointment only. Now the Metro Public Health Department, which oversees animal control, says capacity issues have gotten so severe there can be no surrender services at all.

The agency says that getting more volunteers to foster pets would shore up space, and that the agency provides food and supplies.

Metro departments have been sharing their annual budget requests. For the upcoming fiscal year, Public Health asked for nearly half-a-million dollars to hire six new workers and to buy trucks for them to use. The memo says animal control is getting more calls than ever before — for loose dogs, as well as dog bites. It attributes the surge to the wave of pet adoptions during the pandemic and a resulting “population explosion.”